Stopped in Kmart today to buy Halloween candy because it’s no fun when little kids knock on your door on Halloween night looking for candy and all you have to give them is a speech about how you WOULD have had candy if your life were DIFFERENT and you would have GONE TO COLLEGE — wait — FINISHED COLLEGE all the umpteen times you went and studied business or interior design or paralegal technology, or ANYTHING BUT JOURNALISM which is the field you ended up in because you crave writing and working with people like you crave those damn cajun filet biscuts at god-forsaken BOJANGLES (seriously, why can’t I say no? why can’t any of us? they’re drugging us, right? that’s tainted cajun spices in those biscuts … tainted addiction that tastes SO good and feels SO right) and so here you are working all the time and making small amounts of money for fantastic things like CAR INSURANCE and CELL PHONE BILLS — none of which you can eat on Halloween, but, HEY, try it kids because THAT’S ALL I HAVE TO OFFER YOU. BILLS. AND A REASON TO GO TO COLLEGE.

I got the candy and as I was leaving, sweet grandma lady was popping big huge piles of golden, fluffy, buttery, salty popcorn — each pop calling to me “Timmi … eat us! We are crunchy and full of sodium! We love you!” so I bought The Big Bag and have been happily munching away on it at work.

Until JB gets here. JB, aka Lord of the Letters to the Editor, tells me bad, evil stories about how it’s not fresh popped pop corn, even though I saw the grandma lady pop it with my own eyes. Tells me wretched stories about working in a movie theater where they stored old popped popcorn in big, plastic bags up in the attic where the movie spiders live with the movie rats. And how they’d send some minion with scaly hands and bad breath up there to retrieve the bags so they could dump them in the machine and turn it on for a bit and make it LOOK LIKE it was popping but it wasn’t popping. And they used coconut oil. Old, stale coconut oil.

He has sucessfully ruined my precious, popcorn state of zen where all my troubles were being taken care of by this huge bag of crunchy goodness. He has replaced my calm comfort food with dark images of movie creatures and skanky popcorn and sweet grandma people who are really robot things similar to those seen in Futureworld.

Damn it.

Happy Halloween.